Hasta La Gadget!

In response to the presumed kidnapping of three young Israelis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck back with a vengeance. While directly blaming Hamas for the act, he also declared the Palestinian Authority ultimately responsible. Netanyahu quickly launched “Operation Brother’s Keeper”– an antiseptic name for a full scale assault on the entire Palestinian population in the occupied territories. Hundreds of Hamas leaders have been arrested and now are being held without charge. Entire communities have been closed off, victims of illegal collective punishment. Checkpoints have intensified. Within some cities, door to door searches are underway. Homes have been destroyed and families dispossessed. Fear is widespread, as is anger.

By any measure, the kidnapping (and I am assuming that is what it was) was a wicked and stupid act. Wicked, because attacking civilians, who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, is never acceptable. In no way, can the action be justified as moral, responsible, or an act of resistance.

Nothing can justify Israel’s flagrant violations of international law or their demonstrated contempt for human rights. But because the Israeli response was completely predictable, the kidnapping must also be judged to have been stupid and irresponsible. The perpetrators must be condemned for their callous disregard not only for the lives of three youngsters they now hold, but for the suffering they have brought to the Palestinian people.

There is another way in which Netanyahu is to blame for this horror. In a perverse way, he has established the logic which guides the behavior of the kidnappers. The Israelis have long made a practice of exchanging prisoners. With thousands of Palestinians in their prisons, including hundreds being held without charge, the Israelis often treat them as objects for barter. Not too long ago, Netanyahu presented Hamas with over one thousand prisoners in exchange for a captive Israeli soldier. With Palestinian society closely following the weeks’ long hunger strike of 100 administrative detainees (those held for prolonged periods without any charges or trial), one supposes that some might have assumed that the way to end the torment of these captives was to create the conditions for another prisoner exchange.

While Netanyahu has declared with certainty that Hamas is responsible for the kidnapping, no evidence for this charge has been offered, and to a Hamas-hating Israeli public, no evidence appears to be needed. But guilty or not, Hamas has behaved badly before and after the kidnapping. Despite agreeing to a reconciliation pact with the PA, they have continued to make irresponsible boastful statements maintaining their right to “armed resistance”. (I am reminded of a quote from the late great Tawfik Zayyad who once said “you may have the right, but when you use it as badly as you have, you forfeit that right.”) Since the kidnapping, instead of behaving as responsible partners in a unity government, Hamas got cagey. They would not condemn the act and instead, “a high ranking Hamas official” told Al-Monitor, “Hamas truly does not know who stands behind the operation, because there is a separation of duties between the military and political branches of the movement. The politicians instruct the military to find a solution to the prisoner dossier, and the men on the ground have the freedom to choose the time, place, and operational details.”

The kidnapping has been a godsend for Netanyahu. He was under increasing international pressure for his continued illegal settlement expansion and his responsibility for the collapse of the peace talks. His rejection of the Palestinian unity government was rebuffed by Europe and the US. And he was on the ropes at home, after new revelations of his questionable spending habits and an embarrassing defeat for his favored candidate in the recent Presidential contest.

With the kidnapping, Netanyahu has been reborn. Playing the victim card and confronting enemies is what he loves most and does best. The kidnappers have given the Prime Minister an undeserved second wind. No longer “the obstacle to peace,” he has become “the defender of his victim people.”

The PA’s unity government enterprise has also been impacted by these events. Abu Mazen is clearly not responsible for this state of affairs, but try to tell that to average Israelis. And try to tell Palestinians that Abu Mazen’s approach to peace through negotiations is the correct path, when they see new settlements going up, their communities ravaged by an unjust siege, their detainees dying, and Netanyahu crowing.

The hunger striking detainees are also victims of the kidnapping. These are not men guilty of any crime– nor have they ever been charged with any crime. Their plight and their right to be freed from illegal incarceration, once gaining support in Israel and the West, is now forgotten.

With Netanyahu hell-bent on wiping out Hamas, there should be no doubt that this enterprise will backfire just as it has in the past. Extremist groups, born of resentment and reacting to powerlessness, are only fueled by more oppression. This was the lesson Rabin should have learned when he attempted to destroy Hamas in the early 1990’s. It was the lesson that Sharon and Olmert should have learned in the last decade. They did not, and neither has Netanyahu.

The lesson to all sides should be clear, but they have never been learned: more violent resistance will not end the occupation, and more violent repression will not end the resistance. Negotiations and non-violent resistance are the only way forward. But right now, in the midst of this unfolding tragedy, no one appears to be listening.

WASHINGTON — The divisive role that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has played within the Republican Party on matters of foreign policy was amplified on Friday amid ongoing chaos in Iraq.

At a gathering of social conservatives in Washington, D.C., Paul’s call for more measured U.S. engagement — if not outright restraint — was criticized by fellow attendees, including a potential rival for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

In an interview with The Huffington Post outside the Faith and Freedom Conference, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a 2012 presidential candidate, offered a message “to the Rand Paul types” within his party.

“You can see what happens when America creates a vacuum,” Santorum said. “Other people fill it, and it is not to our security interests.”

Paul’s remark that President Barack Obama wasn’t to blame for the rise of Sunni militants in Iraq drew even more admonishment from the neoconservative wing of the party, which has begun openly fretting about the possibility that the Kentucky Republican could end up becoming the GOP standard-bearer.

Michael Goldfarb, founder of the unapologetically hawkish Free Beacon, distilled Paul’s message on foreign policy into a simple: “Don’t blame Obama.” After tweeting his disdain, he elaborated in an email to The Huffington Post.

“The hawks in the party well know the dangers of supporting Obama policies out of principle — the Afghan surge, NSA surveillance, strikes against Assad, all Obama policies that we supported because they were the right thing to do,” Goldfarb wrote. “In each case we saw the Republican base recoil at the administration’s incompetence and mismanagement. Now Rand, who shares Obama’s view of the limits of American power, is supporting Obama’s policy of doing nothing in Iraq and Syria. Good luck with that!”

These are not uncharted waters for Paul, who has been unapologetic in his position that U.S. interventions overseas have caused as many (if not more) problems than they’ve solved. His father campaigned on a similar doctrine during his last two presidential runs and earned a healthy following among war-weary conservatives in the process.

The younger Paul has been careful to assure his fellow party members that he’s no isolationist. And in his own speech at the Faith and Freedom Conference, he made sure to assure the crowd that “if attacked, it is our duty to defend your family, to defend your country, or defend our freedom.”

But Paul also spent much of Friday making the case that the Iraq war was a mistake and that similar enterprises needed to be avoided in the future. There is, he said in his speech, “a misguided belief that we should project strength through war.”

“During the Iraq war, think about what happened,” he said. “A quarter of a million Iraqi Christians fled Iraq. They feared the Shiite government that is there now that we helped put in place after Saddam. They fled in droves by the hundreds of thousands.”

Later, during a taping of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Paul criticized the president’s Republican critics, particularly former Vice President Dick Cheney.

“What’s going on now — I don’t blame on President Obama,” he said. “Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame the Iraq war on the chaos that is in the Middle East.”

Remarks like these have caused advocates of aggressive U.S. militarism to pull out their hair in frustration and prompted critics to accuse Paul of willful naiveté. But the politics aren’t simply defined, and because Paul’s positions poll increasingly well, it’s forced some GOP lawmakers to perform verbal gymnastics.

As he criticized Paul’s worldview, Santorum struggled to grapple with his own support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Obviously, if I knew what was happening today was going to happen, then I, you know, would have made a different decision,” he told HuffPost. “But I made the decision based upon what I knew at the time and you can’t rework that. I think we’ve learned a lot from this experience and that certainly will affect my decisions going forward.”

Told that it sounded like he regretted his vote to authorize the war, Santorum shot back.

“No,” he said. “I said I wouldn’t change my vote based upon what I knew at the time. I think it was the right thing to do at the time. But I think we have learned a lot from this experience.”

On the stage at the Faith and Freedom Conference, elected officials avoided re-litigating the initial launch to war and largely focused on chastising Obama. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), reflecting the prevailing mood from the podium, said the terrorist group ISIS’s march through western Iraq demonstrated the “failure of an American leader to speak clearly, profoundly, and inspirationally about what America’s role is.”

“Whether it is drawing a red line in Syria and then not enforcing it, hurting America’s credibility and allowing the Russian leader to fill the vacuum of leadership in a way that will not be good for the world, and then watching how that movement moves from Syria to now causing the issues they are causing in Iraq,” he said, “all of these things are happening in my opinion because of a lack of clarity and principle in American leadership.”

And yet, if Republican lawmakers were concerned about the rise of Paulism, the crowd itself was decidedly more torn. According to some at the conference, Paul remains blind to modern realities.

“Unfortunately, in today’s world, everybody is within hours of each other,” said Charlie Beatty, an attendee from Pennsylvania. “America has to stand up for its interests throughout the world. It is nice to be able to say, 250 years ago when the country was founded, to stay away from foreign entanglements. That’s great. But you had 3,000 miles of ocean and little ships, there was no way that America was going to be threatened by anybody. It is different now … The threats are within minutes.”

But to many more, Paul’s notions of foreign policy restraint after years of war are a revelation. As is often the case with these types of gatherings of activists, the senator’s foreign policy comments got loud applause in the hall and kudos outside of it.

“The trend in this country is going away from Rick Santorum and towards Rand Paul,” said Kelly Nigohosian, a Detroit-based lawyer who attended the conference. “In Iraq, there is going to be a war there all the time, whether we are there or not. Should our troops get killed in the process? Should we spend money there that we could use for education here?”

Former New York Jets running back Curtis Martin didn’t always wear the jersey number 28. But when he did adopt the number, he did so for religious reasons, according to a recent interview on NBCSN’s Pro Football Talk.

The 41-year-old Hall of Famer told the interviewer that when the number became available he sought consultation from a pastor on whether to adopt it or not.

“I was speaking to someone about what numbers, what options I had. And at the time I was speaking to a pastor and I told him what numbers were available between 26 and 28, and he said 28. He said because that is a really important Bible verse. It’s Deuteronomy 28, and he said that it talks about the blessings for obedience and all that.”

Not only did Martin adopt the number on his jersey, he told NBCSN, but he also developed a ritual surrounding the Biblical passage. “I took the number and Deuteronomy 28 became my only ritual before every game,” Martin said. “I would read it and that’s the reason why I wore number 28.”

Deuteronomy 28 is largely a passage on God’s blessings that arrive through obedience. It begins:

And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth:

And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.

Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.

Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.

Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

Martin retired from the New York Jets in 2005 and joined the Hall of Fame in 2012.

Though great advances have been made to maximize the amount of sunlight that
is absorbed by solar cells, the best solution, until now, is a two-step
chemical process that enables the cells to absorb 96 percent of the
sun’s light.  That’s an excellent result.  But Rice University chemists
have created a single-step process that enables the cells to absorb 99
percent of the sun’s light, a process that is not only more efficient
than other current processes, but less expensive.

Following its text-and-voice-only promotional plan launched earlier this week, Virgin Mobile is going farther in the no-data direction, launching a cheaper $20 PayLo plan that offers only one thing: texting or voice, depending on which you select. The new plan is only being made available through Walmart, and will work with an ordinary cell phone. Under it, users will get … Continue reading